Recovering The Lost Histories
The Iberia African American Historical Society Center for Research & Learning opens this month at the Shadows-on-the-Teche
After retiring in 2013 from a long career as a professor of Communicative Disorders and as Dean of the College of General Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. Phebe Hayes decided to volunteer her time with the library in her hometown of New Iberia.
While working in the genealogy section, she came across a book celebrating the great doctors of Iberia Parish from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth. Every single doctor included was male and white. “But I knew that couldn’t be true, because I grew up about a block away from the home of Dr. George Dick, who had been a Black doctor in Iberia Parish for over fifty years,” said Hayes. “And I knew it wasn’t true because I grew up hearing my grandparents talk about their wonderful Black doctors in the 1940s, and how some of them had been beaten and expelled from Iberia Parish. Most Black kids growing up in my generation had heard those stories.”
She was holding, in her hands, just one example of the way Iberia’s Black history had been completely erased. And then, in that library, she started to see it everywhere. The books listing local veterans of World War I and World War II? Pages and pages of white men, exclusively. “My family has been in the military since the Civil War,” said Hayes. “We have cemeteries scattered throughout New Iberia that are filled with military markers from the Civil War, the Spanish American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. All Blacks—men and women.”
A researcher by nature and by profession, Hayes started doing the work to find these missing narratives—digging into records at the Clerk of Court’s office, the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Amistad Center, the Historic New Orleans Collection, newspaper archives, and more. “If you omit or exclude marginalized people from the writing of the narratives of a community, then they don’t exist,” said Hayes. Among many, many other stories, her research revealed that there were over twenty Black doctors associated with Iberia Parish—who were either born there or practiced there—during the period covered in that book she had found.
All of this sparked in Hayes a fierce dedication to recovering the lost histories of Iberia Parish’s Black residents—whose African ancestors came to the area long before the Acadian and Spanish peoples that have come to define Iberia’s history. In 2017, she founded The Iberia African American Historical Society—an organization devoted to researching, educating, and commemorating the history of African Americans in Iberia Parish.
The Society’s work has included various educational lectures; publications of books, articles and a journal; and the installation of various historical markers around Iberia Parish honoring the contributions of important African American figures in the area’s history. They have also created an online database of names and regimental affiliations of Black Civil War veterans with New Iberia connections.
And soon, the Society will do all of this and more from a dedicated destination, open to the public. The Iberia African American Historical Society Center for Research & Learning will officially open later this month on the second floor of the Shadows-on-the-Teche Visitor Center as a space in which the Society will collect and archive primary documents, digitize them, and grant the public—including schools, historians, researchers, and more—access to them.
“If you omit or exclude marginalized people from the writing of the narratives of a community, then they don’t exist,” —Dr. Phebe Hayes
The Center is a result of a partnership between the Society and the National Trust for Historic Preservation—which owns and manages the Shadows property—as part of the Trust’s efforts to provide more truthful and thorough historical programming at former sites of enslavement around the country. “The National Trust, the Shadows staff—everyone’s been in lockstep,” said Hayes. “They saw this vision before I did.” She added that the community has been nothing but supportive of her efforts from the beginning, and she is eager to see how they take advantage of these resources. “People know intuitively that the history they’ve been given is incomplete, and they welcome the opportunity to get a richer and truer history.”
Her goal, she said, is to educate on this history in Iberia Parish, but also to encourage and stimulate interest in researchers so that more of it can be uncovered. “And it’s also understanding that we aren’t unique. Every state like ours that’s a former Confederate state has this same history, and in all of these places, there is African American history that has been hidden, and needs to be recovered.”
Learn more about the society at iaahs.org and about the National Trust’s work at Shadows-on-the-Teche at shadowsontheteche.org. A soft opening of the Iberia African American Historical Society Center for Research and Learning will be held on November 12 at 2 pm.